"Yet today, How to Be an Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts."

"This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that 'racist' is not a pejorative identity, like 'evil,' but a descriptive term that should be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial disparities — is focused on material effects. 'I don’t know how anyone could read any of my books' and think of them as self-help, Kendi says. But the apparent simplicity of its 'this or that' labeling system proved irresistible to institutions eager to virtue signal their way out of fixing inequality. As antiracism became a corporate DEI buzzword, Kendi was excoriated by criticism across the ideological spectrum. Journalist Tyler Austin Harper accused him of peddling 'self-help for white people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities.' The conservative strategist Christopher Rufo branded Kendi the chief exponent of 'critical race theory,' the GOP’s bogeyman for the 2022 midterms...."

From "Ibram X. Kendi Can’t Separate His Fame From How to Be an Antiracist/His new book deserves to be judged on its own terms" (NY Magazine).

Does Kendi regard it as "criticism" to be regarded as a leader in "critical race theory"? When did that happen? I should think that would be a point of pride. But no, conservatives have "branded" Kendi!

"I think of the [antiracist] programming as a kind of secular religion, a progressive penitence."

"The real work of advancing equality is never mentioned. One exercise that consultants recommend is for students to visit a grocery store to observe who is 'enforcing white supremacy culture.'"

Said Steve Wilson, quoted in "He’s a Foe of D.E.I. in Schools but Not a Fan of Trump’s Crusade/Steven Wilson was forced out of the charter school network he started for an essay that conflicted with antiracism initiatives. Five years later, he feels both vindicated and dismayed" (NYT).

Wilson got "canceled" in 2019: 

"Kendi is a vegan, a tall man with a gentle, serious nature.... He considers himself an 'introvert and loner' who was chased down by the spotlight..."

"... and is now caught in its glare.... There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding.... Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs [at the Center for Antiracist Research].... In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division.... 'When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,' he told me.... Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with [Robin] DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers 'white identity' to be 'inherently racist,' while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations... that racism is 'prejudice plus power.' Kendi thinks of 'racist' not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description.... Racist and antiracist are 'peelable name tags,' Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool...."

 
From "Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own/In 2020, the author of 'How to Be an Antiracist' galvanized Americans with his ideas. The past four years have tested them — and him" (NYT).

"Nobody really gets scolded for being a sellout anymore. In the three decades since its heyday, in the late eighties and early nineties..."

"... the term has grown to seem a bit old-fashioned. The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, understandably do not have much patience for Gen X-ers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters or whatever else. The rent is high, and the bills don’t stop. Precarity is everywhere...."

That's the first paragraph of "Ibram X. Kendi, Hasan Minhaj, and the Question of Selling Out/Is it possible to reap all the rewards of the mass market and still maintain a sense of political purpose?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker). 

"In June, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled 'I am the wrong kind of Black professor,' which criticized the default assumption..."

"... that Black academics should be interested in Black subjects. Afterward, I found myself inundated by a small flood of requests to write and talk about race in America. Ironically, saying that I’m sick of talking about being Black invited a rush of opportunities to do just that.... We all make choices, and I don’t want to suggest that Kendi is a victim or that we should pity him. He basked in the accolades and accepted lavish speaking fees. But though I don’t condone Kendi’s race grift, I do understand how easy it would be to become a grifter. His rise in 2020, and his ignominious decline today, are a mirror held up to liberal America. His failure, intellectual and moral, is as much ours as it is his."

Writes Tyler Austin Harper, in "Ibram X. Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale — so was his rise/White American elites are always ready to turn a Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda"  (WaPo).

Here's the Boston Globe article: "I am the wrong kind of Black professor/I’ve staked my career on my interest in the dead white men of 19th-century British letters. I can’t count the times I’ve been told what a waste it is that I’ve done so."

"NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has written a defense of Ibram Kendi which is probably the least convincing thing you’ll read today."

"To be clear, I don’t think the problem is with Goldberg, who is a decent writer when she has a meaty story to work on. The problem in this case is that attempting to blame Kendi’s problems on 'the system' just isn’t credible.... If the left wasn’t so driven by fads and celebrity, this wouldn’t have happened. Why wouldn’t it have happened? Because Kendi never would have been given all of that money in the first place. This is the best defense she can come up with. It’s not Kendi’s fault he was unprepared and undisciplined, it’s everyone else’s fault for believing in him.... But Goldberg’s readers just aren’t buying it. There are so many good responses here I’m not sure where to begin...."

Writes John Sexton (at Hot Air)(with lots of quotes from NYT readers).

Here's the Goldberg column: "Ibram X. Kendi and the Problem of Celebrity Fund-Raising."

"The globalist billionaire who funded the woke transformation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello paid for a similar overhaul of James Madison’s house..."

"[B]lindsided tourists are hammered by high-tech exhibits about Madison’s slaves and current racial conflicts, thanks to a $10 million grant from left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein.... Visitors to Montpelier get to see just three rooms in the sprawling mansion.... Outdoors and in the house’s huge basement, dozens of interactive stations seek to draw a direct line between slavery, the Constitution, and the problems of African Americans today. 'A one hour Critical Race Theory experience disguised as a tour,' groused Mike Lapolla of Tulsa, Okla., after visiting last August. Hurricane Katrina flooding, the Ferguson riots, incarceration, and more all trace back to slavery, according to a 10-minute multi-screen video. Another exhibit damns every one of the nation’s first 18 presidents — even those, like John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, who never owned slaves — for having benefited from slavery in some way. The only in-depth material about the Constitution itself appears in a display that pushes the claim, championed by the controversial 1619 Project, that racism was the driving force behind the entire American political system.... Even the children’s section of the gift shop leans far left, with titles like 'Antiracist Baby' by Ibram X. Kendi and 'She Persisted' by Chelsea Clinton."

From "Founding father James Madison sidelined by woke history in his own home" (NY Post).

In my day the expression was: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

That coercive line of reasoning has morphed into something even harsher, as explained by Glenn Greenwald in "Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting 'Insurrection' Fears. Congress's 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet. Following the 9/11 script, objections to government overreach in the name of 1/6 are demonized as sympathy for terrorists. But government abuses pose the greater threat":

When it comes to 1/6 and those who were at the Capitol, there is no middle ground. That playbook is not new. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" was the rigidly binary choice which President George W. Bush presented to Americans and the world when addressing Congress shortly after the 9/11 attack. With that framework in place, anything short of unquestioning support for the Bush/Cheney administration and all of its policies was, by definition, tantamount to providing aid and comfort to the terrorists and their allies. There was no middle ground, no third option, no such thing as ambivalence or reluctance: all of that uncertainty or doubt, insisted the new war president, was to be understood as standing with the terrorists.

"And so how would you build that policy to eliminate the racial wealth gap?"/"So that’s not something that I know."

That's a super-short exchange that takes place at the end of a podcast full of long-winded exchanges between Ezra Klein and Ibram X. Kendi.

In transcript form at "Ibram X. Kendi on What Conservatives — and Liberals — Get Wrong About Antiracism/A challenging discussion on the hard, and sometimes unanswerable, questions around racism and public policy" (NYT).

"In which academic discipline is this circular, naive, deer-caught-in-the-headlights response to a basic and urgent question considered insightful or excellent?"

In which academic discipline is this circular, naive, deer-caught-in-the-headlights response to a basic and urgent question considered insightful or excellent?

A national culture exempting this (which, sadly, is typical of him) from judgment is unintentionally racist itself. pic.twitter.com/n493NpjFmx

— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) June 1, 2021